Archive for July, 2004

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party.What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.

The party’s over, and it turns out no one showed. A blizzard of Democrats blocked the roads and derailed the T; all the actual residents of Massachusetts paid attention to the weather scare and stayed home. There weren’t enough Democrats to make up for the loss of regular business downtown—the restaurants were empty. This is a second-hand report based on the Metro (all the bias of the Globe in a fraction of the space!), because I didn’t venture any nearer downtown during the DNC than Coolidge Corner. Why risk a strip-search by riding the T?

It’s been a long time since I’ve used IRC; I think it’s time to download a new client. I used to use ShadowIRC, but it’s time to move on. Ircle and Snak are still the big shareware names, but I was looking for something that won’t give me guilt when I neglect the shareware fee.

On the free front, I found Colloquy and Fire. The latter also does AIM, MSN, and Yahoo chats, plus ICQ, but I’m trying out Colloquy first because it looked the prettiest.

[Time passes…]

I’d forgotten just how annoying IRC could be. After a long struggle, I got onto DALnet, but there was no one in the chat room. SearchIRC is a good place to find channels, and New IRC Users has a handy command list, marred only by the annoying floating menu. News flash: DHTML is no longer cool.

Thanks to Liz for this link to SecureMac.com, with (happily) no news since May.

I’m back from the woods, the highway is shut down, and all is well with the world. I’ve been unpacking and grocery shopping today, but tomorrow I may have some real blog content. Future entries will be live unless otherwise indicated.

The MCFI (Mass. Con. Fandom, Inc.) put up a list of reasons of why Noreascon 4 is not like the DNC. Noreascon is the upcoming Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention), which is being held this September in Boston.

Now that sort of endless list (70 items and counting) generally isn’t all that funny, but some Patrick Nielsen Hayden and company seem to think it’s also Not Funny. I’m not a big sci-fi fandom fan (you can tell because I call it sci-fi for clarity, rather than the fandom term sf—and I admit to being a Trekkie), but I am a Bostonian. I can attest to the fact that the list is not about Democrats, or, Ghod forbid, “expressing science fiction fandom’s traditional contempt for normal democratic politics.” It’s about the DNC logistical hell that we locals are going through at this very moment, because our city is designed around insecure cowpaths from 375 years ago.

If Patrick Nielsen Hayden says fans are generally contemptuous of democracy I’ll take his word for it, but sometimes a joke is just a joke. I don’t know a single soul on this side of I-495 who can pass up the opportunity to laugh at the latest shenanigans downtown. That’s what you bought when you voted to hold your Worldcon in Boston; please keep it in mind for next time.

If you don’t like New Englanders, there are 44 other states available.

The sun’s blowing chunks again, so Space Weather says today is a good day to see purple auroras in Canada, the northern US, and northern Europe.

In other news, my lightbulb just blew up. I think I unscrewed it and screwed it back in too many times. Fortunately, the shade goes up so I don’t have lightbulb all over the floor. Those things shatter into a zillion pieces when they hit.